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Art Gangs: Protest ei Counterculture in New York City is a book that as an object reflects the DIY spirit of its subject: artists' groups. It defies the trend towards high-production, glossy art books, being modest and unassuming in design. Its cover features a faint reproduction of Doug Ashford's some of the people who worked together to mah artists call against the US intervention in Central America in 1983/84, the beauty that was embodied by their work, 2006. This is emblematic of the spirit of the book: a makeshift Cartesian chart that resembles an abstract painting, it illustrates how artists such as Lucy Lippard, Daniel Ortega, Nancy Spero and many others were interrelated and implicated in political causes during the 1970s and 80s in New York. Indeed, Moore's cover is métonymie for the manuscript: the book is the result of a vast amount of research on artists' groups which is meticulously examined, archived and presented.
The book is an outgrowth of Moore's own work with Colab and the former East Village space ABC No Rio and thus is incredibly rich and dense in both content and sources. The copious footnotes, which are useful in themselves, are an illumination of his immense contribution to the topic. He joins former colleagues including Julie AuIt and Lippard in documenting the Avant Garde of 1970s and 80s New York. This was a time when figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring were...